Kabam ends Thirst of Night's modest reign of blood on January 31

The first social game shut down announcement of the year is courtesy of Kabam, creator of Dragons of Atlantis and other core-focused strategy social games. The developer announced that one of its older games, Thirst of Night, will be no more come Jan. 31. All of the vampire-themed strategy game's servers will be shut down on that Thursday.

According to an FAQ detailing the shut down, all payment systems for Thirst of Night have been turned off, meaning players can no longer buy the game's hard currency, Rubies. And for those players that have unspent Rubies, Kabam has offered to transfer the last six months worth of unspent Ruby purchases (up to $5,000) to one of the developer's other games.

Thirst of Night was never hosted on Facebook, but was available on Google+ for a time as well as Pokki and on Download.com, according to Inside Social Games. While it's not possible to track exactly how many monthly or daily players Thirst of Night had just before this announcement, it's safe to say it had less than 5,000 in either category, considering its least popular games have just tens of thousands of monthly players and are still kicking.

In 2013, cutting the fat will become (sadly) an even more popular trend for social game makers. As the powers consolidate and this corner of the industry grows more hit-driven than ever, developers will feel the pressure to focus on supporting their best performers and creating more games like them. Man, growing up sucks.